Hermann Nitsch
‘Aktionist’ who shocked with his gore-soaked performance art
HERMANN NITSCH, who has died aged 83, made his name as a leading exponent of “Vienna Aktionism”, a movement notorious for staging precisely choreographed “actions” featuring nudity, self-mutilation and violence.
As founder of the “Orgies and Mystery Theatre” in the 1950s, Nitsch became known for presiding over stomach-churning rituals of slaughter, religious sacrifice, and crucifixion involving “lacerating of raw meat, disembowelment of slaughtered animals, trampling on the entrails” – and buckets of gore.
Nitsch claimed that the repression of violent impulses and sexual desires is the source of human misery. By ritualistically acting out these desires, he wanted audiences to “set in motion a sex drive which reaches to the very bottom of sado-masochistic excess”.
In 2002 Richard Dorment went to see a re-enactment of one of Nitsch’s historical performance pieces at London’s Whitechapel Gallery: “Gallons of pig’s blood spilled on to the gallery floor,” he reported in
The Daily Telegraph; “the bodies of sacrificial victims were smeared with fruit, vegetables and offal; in a climactic orgy, white-clad assistants used their bare hands to pulverise raw meat, blood and wine.
“But the whole thing was so staged and so phoney that as the men in white coats were scooping out the intestines of an ox to pour over the blindfolded victims, I found myself thinking of last week’s episode of ER.
“What’s more, I find the activities of Herr Nitsch profoundly offensive, an excuse to dignify voyeurism and sadism in the name of art.”
Nitsch was born in Vienna on August 29 1938, the year of the Anschluss, and brought up in Prinzendorf. “I experienced bombing raids every day as a child”, he recalled. “My father was killed in Russia. The war turned me into a cosmopolite and opponent of all nationalisms and all politics.”
In 1966, when one of his performances at the ICA in London was broken up by the police and the curators prosecuted for indecency, one defended his work as an attempt to expiate Nazi guilt, though Nitsch did not put it this way.
He trained in graphic design and worked as a commercial artist before developing the concept of the Orgies Mysteries Theatre in the late 1950s.
Later on he moved into slightly more conventional abstract territory with “spatter-pictures”, in which industrial quantities of red paint were flung, spattered, poured and dripped on to canvases.
Visiting an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in 2005, Richard Dorment, who so disliked Nitsch’s performance art, found his paintings “electrifying”, adding: “You simply can’t get away from the absolute sincerity of these works. They look like bandages, veils of blood, or walls for a firing squad to aim at. It’s as though they carry in them traces of the extreme emotions under which they were created.”
Nitsch, a short, bearded, round-bellied man with a gravelly voice (“like Peter Ustinov playing Moses,” observed one critic) attracted protests from animal rights campaigners, the Catholic Church – and the police.
But he insisted that he was “never interested to make provocation”, and that he “luffed” animals, affectionately listing the animals at his farm in Prinzendorf: “two dankey, cows, sheeps, peacock, geese...”
Besides, he maintained, “the meat I use is not eaten but used for a theatre performance, a higher purpose.”
In the 1960s he was considered so dangerous by the Viennese authorities that he was thrown into prison several times for indecency. By his death, however, he had come to be regarded as a national treasure.
Nitsch’s first marriage to Eva Krannich was dissolved. His second wife, Beate, née Konig, died in 1977.
He is survived by his third wife, Rita née Leitenbor.